Authors: Ryu Murakami
“I’ve decided to organize a festival in this town,” I said. “Adama, I’d like you to help me.”
The rebel element at Northern High was divided into three main factions: the Greasers, the Rockers, and the Politicos. The Greasers were basically into drinking and smoking and chasing pussy, but occasionally indulged in fighting and gambling, and they had connections with the local yakuza. The central figure in this group was a guy named Yuji Shirokushi. The Rockers—also known as the Artistes—carried copies of
New Music
magazine, Jimi Hendrix’s
Smash Hits
, and
Art Today
, grew their hair as long as possible, and walked around flashing the V-sign and mumbling “Peace.” The Politicos were aligned with the Students and Workers Liberation Front at Nagasaki University, and had pooled their money to rent a room in town to use as a hideout. They plastered the walls of the room with posters of Chairman Mao and Che Guevara and surreptitiously circulated leaflets at school. At the core of this faction were two guys named Goro Narushima and Ryo Otaki. There were other groups, too—the Rightists, who were fans of some rabid old prewar imperialist; the Folkies, who were into folk music; the Literati, who put out their own little magazine; the Bikers, and so on—but none of them had many members or were capable of mobilizing large numbers of people.
Although I didn’t belong to any of these factions, I was on good terms with members of all the three main ones. Being a drummer, I often sat in on jam sessions with the Rockers, and I sometimes drank beer with Shirokushi and his gang and showed up for debates at Narushima and Otaki’s hideout.
I also had a friend in the newspaper club named Iwase whose family ran a sewing goods shop and who was exactly what you’d expect someone whose family ran a sewing goods shop to be like. We’d been in the same class in our first year in high school. He was a puny little guy, and a bit dim-witted, but he was hooked on anything to do with Art. Maybe it was connected with the fact that his father had died and he’d grown up with four older sisters, but he’d been keen to make friends with me because my father was an artist. Anyway, Iwase shared my dream of setting up a festival. We were both avid readers of
Art Today
and
New Music
, and had been blown away by the rock fests and happenings described in these magazines. What rock fests and happenings had in common, and what appealed to us about them, were naked women. Neither of us said as much in so many words, but we were obviously of one mind on that score.
“Ken-san,” Iwase had said to me one day, “let’s make friends with Yamada. He’s a good-looking guy, and he gets good grades. With you and him working together, we can do anything.”
I asked him if he was trying to say I wasn’t good-looking and didn’t get good grades, and he said no three times:
“No, no, no. It’s like, Ken-san, you’re, how should I put this, it’s like, don’t get me wrong, your ideas or whatever, the things you think up, are great, but, well, you never really do
anything,
right? I mean, I don’t mean you never do anything, but it’s like, girls, food, whatever’s right in front of you, right?”
In our second year, Iwase and I had decided we wanted to make films and started saving money to buy an eight-millimeter camera. We pooled our allowances and lunch money, but when we’d saved up six hundred yen, I’d gone and treated a Junwa girl to a lunch of chicken and rice, with cream puffs for dessert. That’s the sort of thing he meant.
He was right, though. Adama was good-looking and did well in school, and as a result had quite a following. He’d also been on the basketball team until his junior year and earned a reputation for helping solve a lot of his teammates’ personal, woman, and money problems. In order to make our festival a reality, we had to get him to join forces with us.
Adama and I left the gibbons’ cage and climbed the observation tower. The sun had begun to dip toward the sea.
“I guess everybody’s cleaning the classroom right now, eh?” he said, gazing out at the bay and smiling. I smiled, too.
Adama was learning the joy of ditching class. He asked me to show him the book of poems again.
I have found it
What?
Eternity
The fusion of sun and sea
Adama read it aloud. Peering at the ribbon of sunlight sparkling on the water, he asked me if he could borrow the book. I lent it to him, as well as an album by
Cream
and another by Vanilla Fudge.
That’s how 1969, the third most interesting of my thirty-two years, began.
We were seventeen.
IRON BUTTERFLY
In 1969 we were seventeen. And we still had our
cherries
. To be a virgin at that age is nothing to be particularly proud of and nothing to be particularly ashamed of, but it’s something that weighs on your mind.
The winter I turned sixteen I’d run away from home. My reason for doing so was that I’d perceived a fundamental contradiction in the entire entrance examination system and wanted to get away from my home and school and out on the streets in order to better think about this and to ponder the significance of the struggle that had developed that year between the student radicals and the aircraft carrier
Enterprise.
Sorry. That’s not exactly true. The truth is that I didn’t want to take part in a long-distance race at school. Long-distance running had always been a weak point with me. I’d hated it ever since junior high school. Now that I’m thirty-two and wiser, of course, I still hate it.
It wasn’t that I was a wimp or anything; it’s just that I had a habit of abruptly slowing down to a walk and deciding that I’d run enough. It wasn’t that I’d get a pain in my side, or feel sick or dizzy, either; just that as soon as I felt a bit tired I started walking. If anything, in fact, I was healthier than most. My lung capacity measured over 6,000 cc, and soon after I got to high school I’d found myself among thirteen or fourteen boys summoned to the track and field clubroom. The coach was a young guy, a recent graduate of the Nippon College of Health and Physical Education. He was one of six new P.E. instructors the school had hired to help prepare us for the National Athletic Meet, which was to be held in Nagasaki two years later. One was an expert at judo, one at team handball, one at basketball, one at field events, one at swimming, and one at long-distance running. In 1969, when “Smash the National Athletic Meet” became one of the rallying cries of our student uprising, these experts were a convenient target to attack. They didn’t like us much, either.
Kawasaki, the running coach, had a square head, curly hair, and short but powerful legs that had earned him Japan’s third-best time in the 5,000 meters. This was the spiel he made us listen to in the clubroom:
“For fifteen-year-olds, you boys have all got terrific lungs. I want you to form a long-distance relay team. No one’s forcing you to join, of course, but I strongly recommend that you do. You may not know it, but you were all born to be long-distance runners, and we’re going to make champions out of you.”
I was appalled to learn that my cardio-pulmonary system had condemned me from birth to this dismal prospect.
Once winter vacation was over, all our P.E. classes were devoted to training us for the annual school marathon. That first year, I was subjected to a constant stream of abuse from Kawasaki. Because I tended to slow abruptly to a walk, he called me—I quote—“a scumbag.”
“Listen,” he said. “Running is the basis of all sports. No, it’s more than that—it’s the basis of life. People are always comparing life to a marathon, right? Yazaki, you bum, you’ve got a lung capacity of 6,100, and you just slack off and haven’t run the distance once. You’re a scumbag. You’ll end up in the gutter, wait and see.”
“Scumbag,” “bum”—is that any way for an instructor to speak to an impressionable teenager? Not that I couldn’t understand where he was coming from. It was true, after all, that having run for about five hundred meters, I’d stop to stroll along with all the slobs, chatting about the Beatles and girls and motorbikes and what have you, and then, when there were five hundred meters or so left to go, I’d start running again and wouldn’t even be breathing hard as I crossed the finish line.
“It’s all my fault. I didn’t bring you up properly,” my long-suffering mother, who was in Korea during the war, says even to this day. When things get a bit difficult, I quit; when some little thing stands in my way, I just give up and go with the flow; always looking for the easy way out, the path of least resistance—that’s me, she says. I hate to say it, but she’s right.
Nevertheless, I did take part in the long-distance race my first year. The course covered seven kilometers: from the school to Mt. Eboshi, halfway up the mountain, and back. Along with the geeks, the physically unfit, and my fellow gutless wonders, I walked silently up the mountain road to the turning point, being passed by a number of girls who’d started five minutes later, then bounded lightly back down the road to the school, where most of the students were already wrapped in blankets, gasping for breath, or being led off, puking, to the first-aid room, or drinking hot glucose with trembling hands; and when I crossed the finish line, number 598 out of 662 male students, whistling “A Day in the Life,” not only Kawasaki but most of the teachers there agreed that I was scum.
Being the
sensitive child
I was, I didn’t want to go through that sort of thing again, so in the winter of my second year, when I was sixteen, I ran away from home.
I withdrew the nearly thirty thousand yen I had in postal savings and headed for the sprawling metropolis of Hakata. In addition to avoiding the school marathon, there was one other thing I wanted to accomplish during this trip.
Losing my virginity.
As soon as I reached Hakata, I checked into the ANA Hotel—the fanciest hotel in all of Kyushu at the time—then put on my George Harrison-style tweed jacket and hit the streets. I was strolling down an avenue lined with leafless trees, singing “She’s a Rainbow,” when a woman’s voice said, “Hi there.” It was dusk, and the sky was a pale, heart-stirring purple. The voice belonged to a woman several years older than me who looked a lot like Marianne Faithfull and was driving a silver E-type Jaguar. She beckoned to me with her forefinger, opened the door of the Jag, and said, “I have a favor to ask you. Would you mind getting in? Please?” I got in. Her perfume was intoxicating. “You see,” she said, “I used to be a top fashion model but I got into a bit of trouble in Tokyo and had to hide out down here for a while and now I’m working at a very exclusive club called Cactus and I got involved with this customer and it’s turning into a problem, you see, because he’s a yakuza who owns a lumber-yard and he wants to set me up as his mistress and won’t take no for an answer but, well, I don’t really need the money and I don’t want to be anybody’s mistress so I told him I’ve got a younger brother who’s my only living relative and he’s got heart disease so I have to stay with him, but I don’t actually have any brothers so I was planning to get somebody to play the part but I never got around to it and today’s the day I’m supposed to go talk to the guy, so...” She asked me if I’d be willing to pretend to be her brother for just one day. I looked at her silver fox coat and her crimson nail polish and her miniskirt and her long, slender legs and naturally agreed to help. She took me to a riverfront building, where the yakuza had an office on the seventh floor. He was a huge guy in his early sixties with a bull neck and seven young punks working for him. Some of the punks had tattoos. The guy said, “He looks awful healthy for a kid with heart disease.” Then he slapped himself on the chest and said, “Anyway, just leave it to me. I’ll pay for the operation.” “We don’t need your money,” I said. “My sister’s not going to be your mistress, and that’s all there is to it.” His sidekicks got pissed off at this and started shouting, and two of them pulled knives out of their belts. I stood in front of the woman to protect her and said, “If you’ve got to kill somebody, kill me.” Then I made up some stuff about how our parents had divorced and we’d been raised by our grandmother and she’d died four years ago and now it was just me and my sister and we’d promised each other to stick together through thick and thin and that someday we’d find a way to be happy no matter what. Deep down inside, as it turned out, the yakuza was a real softie, and by the time I’d finished he had tears in his eyes and was mumbling, “Okay, you win.” The woman was thrilled. To celebrate, we had a full-course dinner at a French restaurant, where she poured me some red wine and whispered, “You’re quite a guy, aren’t you?” Afterward, she took me to her place. It was a big open-style condominium, the kind you see in the movies, with a king-size bed right in the middle of it. The woman giggled and said, “I’m going to take a shower. Don’t go away!” and disappeared into the bathroom. I kept telling myself,
Keep cool
,
keep cool
, but I didn’t know what the hell to do and just sat there pulling the zipper on my pants up and down. Eventually she reappeared wearing a see-through black negligee and said, “You don’t know how grateful I am. Tonight I’m all yours... I know that’s not enough, though... so I want you to have the Jag as well... It suits you perfectly...”
At least, that’s the story I made up for my friends when I got back. The truth is a little different.
The first thing I did when I reached Hakata was take in a triple bill of porno films. Then, after a bowl of noodles and some fried pork dumplings, I went to a strip show in one of those hole-in-the-wall sort of joints. It was past 1:00
a.m.
when I left there, and as I was strolling along beside the river, an elderly pimp—a woman—approached me and said, “Like to get your pipes cleaned, son?” I gave the old crone three thousand yen, and she took me to a grimy little inn where a woman with dark rings around her eyes, like a raccoon, called out “Good
eeev
ening.” Looking at the raccoon’s round belly, I thought of my mother, who right at that moment was probably in tears, worrying about me. I began to feel like crying myself, and suddenly losing my virginity didn’t seem so important, but I let the raccoon help me off with my clothes. She was obviously in a hurry to get it over with, but I just couldn’t get it up. “It’s no use,” she said finally. “I’ll spread my legs and let you look. You can do yourself.” It was the first time I’d ever seen what she showed me. It wasn’t that big a deal—not as big as the ten thousand yen she took off me when I told her to pack it in. I left the place in a mood of black despair and continued walking along the river. Half my money was gone, so I decided to sleep in the waiting room at the station rather than stay at a cheap hotel. I asked a salaryman type in a suit and tie which way the station was. When I told him I was planning to sleep there, he offered to let me stay at his apartment. I was pretty miserable, and it was nice to be shown some kindness, so I went with him. Once we got there, he made me a corned beef sandwich, which I appreciated, but, as anyone might have guessed, this led suddenly to a hand on my crotch and him trying to kiss me on the lips, whispering, “You don’t mind, do you?” It was getting to be just one damn thing after another, and I’d had enough. I reached into my bag, pulled out a camping knife, and stuck it in the table. The guy started trembling all over. It occurred to me then that I might be able to recoup the thirteen thousand yen I’d given the old woman and the raccoon, plus four thousand for a hotel room, but—why did nothing seem to go right?—I suddenly had to piss.
“Hey! Where’s
the toilet?”
I shouted. It’s hard to imagine a more ludicrous line for someone wielding a knife. No sooner had I stepped inside the bathroom than I heard the man run out the door. As I was pissing I began to realize that what I’d done might be construed as armed robbery, and I convinced myself that he’d be back shortly with the cops. I had to escape. It’s at times like this, though, that a piss lasts forever. When I finally finished I was out of the fag’s apartment in seconds flat. I can’t tell you how ridiculous I felt, sprinting down the streets of Hakata after I’d run away from home to avoid a footrace. I ran much harder than I ever had in any P.E. class, and it was dawn before I stopped. I staggered into a fairly large park and guzzled water from a drinking fountain, then lay down on a bench to wait for the sun to rise. I figured I’d probably feel better once I’d warmed up a bit. I fell asleep for a while as I was waiting, and awoke to the soft touch of sunlight on my cheek and a loud twanging in my ears. Through the white morning mist that hung over the park I could see a small stage where a bunch of dudes with long hair were tuning some instruments. There were no drums on the stage, and the guitars were acoustic ones with mikes attached, so I figured they were folkies. In those days folk-singers were on the increase even in Kyushu, thanks to the media coverage of the hootenannies held on the plaza outside Shinjuku Station in Tokyo. People gradually began to gather. It was folk music, all right. They started playing by the time the mist cleared. A guy with hair down to his shoulders, a beard, and a dirty jumper sang stuff by various boring protest singers. A banner on the stage said “Presented by the Fukuoka Chapter of the Peace for Vietnam Committee.” I hated folk. I didn’t like the Peace for Vietnam Committee, either. Living in a town with an American military base made you realize just how rich and powerful America was. A high school student who heard the roar of Phantom jets every day didn’t have to be a genius to know that singing folk songs made about as much difference as farting. People started clapping their hands in time, and I looked on from a distance, muttering
You idiots.
They made speeches between songs: the usual crap—“U.S. out of Vietnam!” and so on. There’d been a girl in my junior high school named Chiyoko Masuda who became a navy whore. She was in the calligraphy club and used to win a lot of prizes. A serious sort. In my second year there, she sent me a love letter, saying she wanted to correspond with me. She said she liked Hesse, and that it had made her happy to hear me mention during a class meeting that I liked Hesse, too, and that it would be nice if we could write each other letters about Hesse and things. I had a crush on a different girl and never wrote back. Then one day during my first year of high school I saw Chiyoko Masuda, her hair dyed red and her face caked with makeup, walking arm in arm with a black sailor. Our eyes met, but she ignored me. There were some navy groupies who lived in a house near mine, and I’d peeked through their windows a few times when they were having sex with American servicemen. I wondered if Chiyoko, too, sucked black guys’
dicks. I couldn’t figure out how calligraphy and Hesse led to black dick. Listening to the pious shit the Peace for Vietnam Committee was belting out, I began to get depressed again and thought of moving on, but I was tired and, besides, I didn’t have anywhere to go. As I sat there grumbling to myself about how dumb the folkies were, I noticed a girl standing next to me, inhaling paint thinner fumes from a plastic bag. “You don’t like folk?” said
the thinner girl
. “No, I don’t,” I said. “My name’s Ai-chan,” she told me. She had a slightly moronic face. We talked about Iron Butterfly and the Dynamites and Procol Harum. Ai-chan’s eyes were bleary. She took my hand and pulled me to my feet, and we started walking away. Ai-chan had been a beautician whose dream was to go to America and see the Grateful Dead, but as the paychecks came in she began to realize that she’d never be able to save enough for the trip, so she became a street kid instead. We had a cream soda, went to a rock café and listened to the Doors, hung around in a department store and ate a bowl of noodles and tempura to kill time till evening, then went to a disco, where they turned us away saying street kids weren’t allowed inside. Ai-chan invited me to her house and said she’d let me do it to her. It seemed to me that a rock-loving, thinner-sniffing, slightly backward chick was the ideal person to offer my virginity to. If I got into the pants of one of the fair ladies of the English Drama Club, say, she might start talking marriage; the raccoon, on the other hand, would have been a real downer. Ai-chan’s place was on a hill on the outskirts of town. It was actually a
house
, which seemed suspicious, and, sure enough, her mother came to the door. With tears in her eyes, she started screeching about high school and dropping out and making a living and Papa’s company and the neighbors and suicide and so on. Ai-chan, loaded on thinner fumes, ignored her and tried to drag me inside, but I hung back when a huge man materialized in the doorway and glared at me. The man snatched the plastic bag out of Ai-chan’s hand and slapped her. Then he turned to me and shouted, “Get out of here!” I followed his advice. As I was leaving, Ai-chan took my hand and said, “Sorry.”